Red Hat's Spacewalk project is getting into place. The project wants to feed development of the Red Hat Network Satellite product for system management. Satellite is a critical tool for Red Hat users as it provides management capabilities for multiple servers for software deployment and updates. Almost six months ago, Red Hat kicked off the Spacewalk project in an effort to create an open source version of Network Satellite that would serve as the upstream project that drives development. According to Red Hat executives, Spacewalk is still in the process of getting aligned with Network Satellite releases in terms of the development model. As well, Spacewalk is now gearing up to replace Network Satellite's proprietary Oracle database backend with an open source database. It's all part of Red Hat's larger efforts to use the open source model effectively in all parts of its business, as well as reducing the costs associated with proprietary databases.